Disclaimer
This is a post about Word Art and how to use it if you aren’t using PowerPoint for your presentations. If you are prone to fits of aesthetic rage, care about good design or could potentially care about good design in the future, you should probably not read this post. It’s not so much that Word Art is an evil entity of itself so much as it is often used in evil ways. It is a worse result of PowerPoint culture than Clip Art and bullet points combined, and even Clippy™ hides his face from the inhumanity of it.
So why am I writing about a tool to help with Word Art? In truth, I’ve used it on rare occasions when I’ve used Keynote to create multimedia projects or slides that aren’t intended for the pulpit, classroom, or boardroom. Also, Keynote (for good reason) contains no tools for creating Word Art. Before progressing down this path, you should study this flowchart and determine whether or not you really want to do this:
Still with me? Okay, let’s venture down this path together. Be wary, though. There is much potential for harm along this treacherous road…
On To Art Text
In seriousness, though, you might find yourself in a situation where you want to create some simple buttons, mocked up logos, or stylized text that are outside of Keynote’s capabilities (though I admittedly rely on external tools less with each release of Keynote). Alternatively, you may want to go beyond the capabilities of Fontwork included in recent versions of OpenOffice and LibreOffice. Here is where a tool called Art Text by BeLight Software can come in.
Quite simply, Art Text is a layer-based text styling application. I discovered it while I was doing some short-lived freelancing as a web designer, and I started using it to make buttons and other typographic images for a couple of projects. It has a little bit of a learning curve, but it’s fairly accessible – especially when compared to trying similar effects in something like Photoshop. The presets range everywhere from useful and cute to downright garish, but you can dissect the templates as much as you want while working in the app.
When you launch Art Text, a Template Gallery appears with a variety of options.
Some *ahem* lovely Word Art
Some pre-made buttons
And some fake logos
Before using Art Text on a real project, I strongly recommend opening up some of the provided templates to manipulate them and get a feel for how the application thinks. It has a very unique feel, and it took me a little while to get used to the app.
Opening a new document presents you with a canvas where the text is treated like an image (and your finished product will be exported as an image). An editor window opens to alter the text from which you can control alignment, spacing, and kerning. Changing the font also opens the standard OS X font panel where you can browse your font collections as you would in Keynote or Pages.
The editor also allows for some interesting options alongside simple text editing.
You can select from a gallery of predefined shapes or icons for each layer, and the icons are divided into several useful categories. You can even import images from the Finder and include them in your project.
Art Text includes a simple vector image editor that allows you to create your own shapes to put into your project. Since Keynote (if that’s what you’re using) has it’s own simple vector editing tool, this may be of little use, but I still think it’s neat they included it.
One of the neatest (and most dangerous) features is the ability to manipulate the text you’re creating as a vector image. Some fonts are easier to work with than others in this mode, but, if you need it, this feature alone can make Art Text worth the entry price. On top of this, you can also fill the text with an image or a texture with a single click, again removing the difficulty behind a pretty desirable effect.
By using some relatively simple features, you can produce some pretty fun results, and that’s exactly where I recommend using a tool like this – in a presentation where you are having a bit of fun.
Art Text has become an indespensible part of my toolbox. Though I rarely use it, each time I launch the app, I enjoy creating in it, and I’m always pleased with the results. As a technical note, you can export your creations as PDFs, which you can drop right into Keynote and resize to your heart’s content with little fear of distortions or artifacts appearing. You can also export in a wide variety of image formats that a number of other programs will accept. It’s a nice tool, and I suggest my Mac-running readers give it a try.
Art Text is available in the Mac App Store for $19.99, and there is a free, feature-limited version available as well. Alternatively, you can download a trial and purchase the application form the developer’s website.
